With last week’s 7 feet of snow in upstate New York heralding an early winter, railroads crisscrossing Chicago are rushing to open 24-hour command centers, install heaters to keep switches from freezing, and plotting ways to reroute traffic. The aim is to avoid the gridlock that started with storms last winter in Chicago, the biggest [...]

WASHINGTON — Right now, you would need $75 minimum and at least nine hours of travel time to get from Chicago to Omaha aboard an Amtrak train cutting across southern Iowa and missing most of the state’s major cities. Not very convenient, or efficient. If Gov. Terry Branstad and the Iowa Legislature had come up [...]

Warning that the frequent railroad trains loaded with crude oil passing through the Chicago area are a “serious risk to public safety,” the City Council is calling for tighter restrictions on the shipments than federal officials proposed in July. Council members on Tuesday also asked that the city and other municipalities be given the authority [...]

CHICAGO – An emergency track-side braking system activated but failed to stop a Chicago commuter train from jumping the tracks and barreling to the top of an escalator at O’Hare International Airport, a federal investigator said Tuesday. The events that led to Monday’s accident, which occurred around 3 a.m. and injured more than 30 passengers, [...]

At a roundtable discussion June 10, local representatives for transportation, labor and commerce urged members of the U.S. House Subcommittee on Railroads, Pipelines and Hazardous Materials to pledge more funding to a plan aimed at overhauling the region’s rail system, otherwise known as the Chicago Region Environmental and Transportation Efficiency Program, or Create. The initiative [...]

Here we go again – or should we say, again and again and again and again. This time it is Canadian National’s Illinois Central Railroad and short line Chicago, Ft. Wayne & Eastern Railroad that have been hit with more than $650,000 in sanctions by the Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration for [...]

CHICAGO — Newspapers and television and radio stations here June 14 were asking Union Pacific, “Is this any way to run a railroad?” after a shortage of UP engineers caused the cancellation of six morning Metra commuter trains and inconvenienced thousands of passengers trying to reach their jobs here. Metra pays UP to operate and [...]

Safety

Winter weather creates a variety of hazards that can significantly impact everyday tasks and work activities. These hazards include slippery roads and surfaces, strong winds and environmental cold.
Learning how to prepare for work during the winter, … (Read More)

Meetings

The SMART Transportation Division has set the dates and locations of the union’s two 2015 regional meetings.
The western regional meeting will be held June 29 – July 1 at the Arizona Biltmore in Phoenix.
The eastern regional meeting will be … (Read More)